During my internship at FEB Digital, a digital product consultancy in London, I wrote a proposal for a speaking slot at the User Centered Design 2015 conference. The topic of the conference was Humanity In Digital Landscapes, and my boss had been struggling to come up with a concept to pitch. My colleagues and I brainstormed together, drawing connections between our ideas to eventually come up with the loose topic of how the internet changed the way we develop our personal interests/hobbies. I wove our outline of ideas into a concise speech proposal that highlighted our overarching focus and raised the questions that we would strive to answer.

When our proposal was accepted, I was asked to expand on our pitch and create a 40-minute speech for the conference. I researched the potential impact of personalization algorithms on the way we develop our interests, balancing the pros with the cons. Much of the conversation about digital’s impact on us, especially when it comes to social interaction or engagement, leans toward the negative. I didn’t want to create something that sounded anti-digital (it was, after all, a conference for digital product developers), but I did want to prompt the audience to consider how these algorithms are shaping their web experience.

I decided to weave the information into a narrative TED-talk like speech that was grounded in a comparison of the way my boss, who was going to be the speaker, developed his passion for music in a pre-digital era vs. how he feeds his passion today. I wove facts and statistics throughout a narrative that I designed around my boss’s own speaking style. I broke the speech into sections that weighed the pros and cons of digital’s influence on our interests, and concluded by encouraging the audience to follow and interact with content outside of their interests.